ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Berlusconi’s lawyer, Niccolo Ghedini

The trial of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi who is charged with corruption and bribery has been postponed until February 27.

Prime Minister Berlusconi is accused of bribing British tax lawyer and offshore consultant, David Mills, with $600,000.

Mills lied about Berlusconi’s offshore companies during the trials that took place in 1997 and 1998. He was indicted on corruption charges and sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison and has appealed the verdict.

Italy’s constitutional court overturned a law last year that granted Berlusconi legal immunity while serving as the prime minister.

The three presiding judges for the trail have postponed it until after Mill’s appeal case is concluded.

Berlusconi has had an extensive record of criminal allegations including mafia involvement, false accounting, tax fraud, corruption and bribery of police officers, lawyers, and judges.

Asks For Data On “Targeted Killings” Of Suspected Terrorists And Civilian Casualties

January 13, 2010

NEW YORK – In a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed today, the American Civil Liberties Union asked the government to disclose the legal basis for its use of predator drones to conduct “targeted killings” overseas. In particular, the ACLU seeks to find out when, where and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, and how the United States ensures compliance with international laws relating to extrajudicial killings.

“The American public has a right to know whether the drone program is consistent with international law, and that all efforts are made to minimize the loss of innocent lives,” said Jonathan Manes, a legal fellow with the ACLU National Security Project. “The Obama administration has reportedly expanded the drone program, but it has not explained publicly what the legal basis for the program is, what limitations it recognizes on the use of drones outside active theaters of war and what the civilian casualty toll has been thus far. We’re hopeful that the request we’ve filed today will encourage the Obama administration to disclose information about the basis, scope and implementation of the program.”

The administration has used unmanned drones to target and kill individuals not only in Afghanistan and Iraq but also in Pakistan and Yemen. The technology allows U.S. personnel to observe targeted individuals and launch missiles intended to kill them from control centers located thousands of miles away.

Today’s FOIA request was filed with the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice (including the Office of Legal Counsel), the Department of State and the CIA.

“The use of drones to conduct targeted killings raises complicated questions – not just legal questions but policy and moral questions as well,” said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project. “These are not questions that should be decided behind closed doors. They are questions that should be debated openly, and the public should have access to information that would allow it to participate meaningfully in the debate.”

The ACLU’s request seeks, in addition to information about the legal basis for the drone program, data regarding the number of civilians and non-civilians killed in the strikes. Estimates of civilian casualties from the government and human rights organizations differ dramatically, from the dozens to the hundreds, giving an incomplete and inconsistent picture of the human cost of the program.

When president Obama was awarded Advertising Age’s 2009 Marketer of the Year award, we were alerted to expect carefully crafted public relations posturing in defense of the reputation of Brand Obama. We have not been disappointed. The president has regularly taken verbal pot shots at the financial oligarchy in a cynical effort to convey the impression that he shares the public’s outrage at the behavior of the plutocrats. But he has thrown no sticks and stones at the banksters, who know as well as you and I that mere words can never hurt them.

None of Obama’s faux outrage has been as disingenuous as his Wednesday announcement that he will finally respond sympathetically to the public’s deep resentment of the administration’s tolerance -and therefore encouragement- of the bad guys’ looting of the public treasury.

Obama assured his constituents that he would “recoup every last penny for American taxpayers” by taking back, in the form of taxes on the banks, the wealth that households have been forced to transfer to the coffers of the instigators of the financial crisis.

The announcement was timed to offset what will surely be another surge of public anger at the expected announcement this week of the banks’ year-end bonus payments.

The proposed taxes would apply to financial institutions with more than $50 billion in assets and would extract about $90 billion from them over ten years. Obama’s central claim is that this would cover all losses incurred by the government under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). We are supposed to be relieved that households will in the end be repaid all that has been transferred from them by TARP. “We want our money back, and we’re going to get it,” said Obama.

A key premise of the tax proposal is that TARP is the government’s sole gift to the financial elite. This is of course false: TARP is in fact a relatively small fraction of the State’s total rescue effort. Financial institutions have also been treated to no-cost and virtually unlimited access to credit, broad guarantees against losses and lax regulation, to mention only the most conspicuous gifts. Even if TARP did represent the administration’s total commitment to financial institutions, Obama’s claim would still be nonsense. TARP handed $700 billion to the banks. How does $90 billion “recoup every last penny” of $700 billion? The president thinks, with good reason so far, that he can get away with anything. Anything. Hence the screamingly counterfactual premise and the slapstick math.

That’s not the worst of it. Neil Barofsky, the Special Inspector General charged with overseeing the bailout plan, reports that the bailout could end up costing $23.7 trillion. Critics of Barofsky accuse him of exaggeration. Let’s suppose they are right. Say Barofsky doubled the true cost of the government’s commitment. So what? Bloomberg reports, with no challengers, that the cumulative commitment to financial rescue initiatives amount so far to more than $8.5 trillion. $90 billion is a small drop in a big bucket.

How do these figures compare to what working people have lost? Households have so far lost $12 trillion in wealth in the wake of the crisis. By the end of the third quarter of 2008, shortly after the announcement of an impending collapse of the entire financial system, households had already lost $647 billion in real estate, $922 billion in stocks, $523 billion in mutual funds and $653 billion in life insurance and pension funds reserves. Total destruction of household wealth in Q3 2008 came to $2.8 trillion, the worst decline on record. That comes to four times TARP’s $700 billion. If “[w]e want our money back,” we’re dead out of luck. Obama knows this, but the man is an instrument of his financial masters, and the ad campaign functioning to obscure this reality requires big lies. The president has these coming out of his ears.

Alan Nasser is professor emeritus of Political Economy at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. He can be reached at nassera@evergreen.edu

“We wonder in Israel why the world relates to us with contempt,” said a commentary in Ma’ariv – “and here is the answer: the pot calling the kettle black”. In Ha’aretz, another commentator said the Israeli apology would have little effect and that “the damage has already been done”. The most serious outcome of all, the writer said, was the “deep erosion in Turkish public opinion.”

…However, there was defiance in some quarters of the Israeli press. A commentator in the leading daily Yediot Aharonot said the Foreign Ministry had “done well” to put a dent in Turkish “incitement” and its “anti-Semite policy”. The writer said Israel had considerable leverage against Ankara, since “world Jewish capital” could boycott Turkey and exacerbate its “deteriorating” economic situation…

“You see the names – Gerald Cassidy, David Castagnetti,, Tommy Boggs – those are all lobbyists I’ve highlighted there who have clients who are drug companies, health insurers, hospitals or all three,” Carney said. “AHIP, Phrma, Pfizer, Blue Cross – everybody is covered there. Aetna somehow isn’t. I don’t know how they got left out.”

“These are the special interests,” Carney said. “These are the people trying to elect Martha Coakley to be vote number 60 for health insurance.”

Carney then puts up a slide showing how the Phrma cash went from supporting Republican candidates for President in the past – to supporting Barack Obama in 2008.

“Barack Obama raised $2.1 million from drug companies in 2008,” Carney said. “That’s about equal to what John McCain raised plus what George Bush raised in both of his elections. It’s the most by far any candidate has raised from the drug industry.”

The people of Massachusetts already have tried a corporate reform that forces them to buy junk insurance.

They don’t like it.

They’re waiting for a candidate that will deliver a message they’ve been waiting to hear.

Bethlehem – Ma’an – As Israeli authorities prepared to expel Ma’an News Agency’s chief English editor later this week, media rights groups have blasted his ongoing detention as an assault on freedom of the press.

Jared Malsin was originally scheduled to be deported without a hearing on Thursday morning. Protests by US authorities in Tel Aviv resulted in a temporary reversal, and an injunction filed by Ma’an delayed the expulsion until at least Sunday.

Reporters Without Borders “condemns the detention and imminent expulsion of US journalist Jared Malsin, who has worked for the past two years as an editor with Ma’an, an independent Palestinian news agency,” the group said on Wednesday in a statement, the first of many that it and others would issue on behalf of the top journalist at Ma’an’s English Desk.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, which monitors freedom of the press worldwide, urged Israel to refrain from taking punitive action against reporters over specific content in their work. “Israel cannot hide behind the pretext of security to sideline journalists who have done nothing more than maintain an editorial line that the authorities dislike,” the organization said.

Indeed, court documents indicated that Malsin’s detention was directly related to his work at the news agency, quoting airport officials as noting that he authored articles “inside the territories,” among them some which “criticized the State of Israel.”

“We are alarmed by the Israeli government’s efforts to deport Jared Malsin on vague security charges,” stated CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Mohamed Abdel Dayem. “We call on the Israeli authorities to ensure that our colleague be allowed to carry out his work without further harassment.”

There is a reason why the corporate media focused on White House state dinner crashers Tareq and Michaele Salahi at last year’s gala honoring Indian Prime Minister Monmohan Singh. The media, which acts in lockstep with major corporate owners like Microsoft and General Electric in pushing for the import of low-wage Indian information technology and other high-technology workers into the United States on H1-B visas, did not want anyone focused on the deal worked out between President Obama and Singh.

Obama was cementing a deal on further Indian workers coming to the United States, a “deal” Obama announced during the height of the primary battle in early 2008 as he was raking in campaign contributions from wealthy Indians — citizens and non-citizens alike.

Obama stated, “I will support a temporary increase in the H-1B visa program as a stopgap measure until we can reform our immigration system comprehensively. I support comprehensive immigration reform that includes improvement in our visa programs, including our legal permanent resident visa programs and temporary programs, including the H-1B program, to attract some of the world’s most talented people to America. We should allow immigrants who earn their degrees in the U.S. to stay, work, and become Americans over time. As part of our comprehensive reform, we should examine our ability to replace a stopgap increase in the number of H1B visas with an increase in the number of permanent visas we issue to foreign skilled workers.”

However, Obama never intended to reform the H-1B system that robs educated and talented Americans of their jobs in the American economy and wage earning potential.

WMR has learned from a reliable Indian source that a majority of the Indian workers arriving in the United States graduated from 40,000 engineering colleges that opened in India between 1990 and 2000. Many of these Indian engineering colleges were never properly licensed or received their dubious accreditation courtesy of Indian politicians anxious to export Indian workers to the United States and, in return, see wage remittances pour into their constituencies from America, thus boosting India’s foreign reserve strength. Many of the engineering colleges that grant degrees to Indian engineers lack sufficient infrastructures and employ faculty with questionable credentials, according to WMR’s source.

In Chennai, for example, almost every street has an engineering college. There is also a direct pipeline between the dubious engineering schools’ job placement offices and the U.S. Embassy visa office in New Delhi.

The exodus of Indian graduates to the United States also involves an Indian Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) program to glean sensitive and classified technology from U.S. companies that employ the engineers and technicians. The mass migration of Indian labor has been linked directly to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other top officials in the Democratic Party. Mrs. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have substantial financial interests in India.

Part of the funding for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, WMR has learned, came from money scammed by Indian stockbroker Harshad Mehta who gamed the Bombay Stock Exchange into seeing a sharp rise in stock. Mehta raked off the profits from his “Ponzi scheme” but when banks called in their investments, the Bombay Stock Exchange collapsed. The Clintons continue to maintain a close financial arrangement with the multi-billionaire Tata family of India through the clan’s sizable donations to the Clinton Foundation.

In 2008, the Indian stock market saw a 50 percent decrease in value. WMR has learned that the earlier “bubble” in the market saw large amounts of money from Indian financial interests pour into the presidential campaign coffers of Barack Obama.

The program to introduce low-paid Indian engineers into the United States began in 1960 with a test population of graduates from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). After the first engineers were placed in U.S. high-technology positions, the RAW and the Indian government built up the program. The Indians had noticed that Israel’s Mossad had successfully penetrated a number of American research and development centers using Jewish engineering graduates from Israel who were obtaining the technical know-how for Israel to build its nuclear arsenal.

Jan. 15 (Bloomberg) — Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said Japan today will end its refueling of ships in the Indian Ocean to aid U.S.-led operations in Afghanistan.

Hatoyama thanks navy personnel who provided fuel and water to ships from Pakistan, the U.S. and other countries, and said Japan will continue to participate in the international efforts against terrorism, according to a statement. Japan in November said it will provide as much as $5 billion over five years to help in the reconstruction of war-torn Afghanistan.

“I think more direct, civilian assistance is important for Afghanistan to secure economic stability and peace,” Hatoyama told reporters today in Tokyo.

Japan’s navy had refueled warships in the Indian Ocean since 2001. Hatoyama’s Democratic Party of Japan ousted the Liberal Democratic Party from 50 years of almost unbroken rule and vowed to end the operations.

To contact the reporter on this story: Sachiko Sakamaki in Tokyo at ssakamaki1@bloomberg.netTakashi Hirokawa in Tokyo at thirokawa@bloomberg.net

The acclaimed British director and winner of Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Ken Loach, has called for the boycott of Israeli movies at the international film festivals and cultural events.

“The massacres and state terrorism in Gaza make the showcasing of Israeli films in various sections of international film festivals unacceptable,” Loach was quoted as saying at a ceremony commemorating Israeli offensive on the besieged Gaza Strip by IRNA.

“Tel Aviv sponsors various international film festivals with the intention to open the way for Israeli films.”

He added the call for a boycott of Israeli cultural products comes from many writers, artists, journalists, lawyers, academics, trades unionists and teachers. They see it as “a contribution to the struggle to end Israel’s occupation, colonization and system of apartheid.”

Last July, Loach withdrew his film ”Looking for Eric” from the Melbourne International Film Festival in protest against the Israel’s sponsorship of another filmmaker. Tel Aviv provided airfare for Tatia Rosenthal, whose film ”9.99” is an Israeli-Australian co-production.

In May 2009, Loach as director of the Edinburgh International film festival returned a £300 gift from the Israeli embassy as a sign of his cultural boycott of Israel and in protest of Tel Aviv’s policies towards the Palestinian people.

The Toronto international film festival (TIFF) came under fire in September for selecting Tel Aviv as the subject of its inaugural City-to-City Spotlight strand. Renowned movie makers including Loach, Jane Fonda and David Byrne were among those who signed a statement supporting Canadian film-maker John Greyson, who withdrew his short film “Covered” from TIFF after learning of the program.

In a letter to the festival, Greyson cited Israeli action in Gaza and the expansion of illegal settlements as reasons for his withdrawal.

A United Nations inquiry led by former South African Judge Richard Goldstone details what investigators call Israeli actions “amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity” during Israel’s offensive against Gaza.

Tel Aviv is worried that charges could be lodged against politicians and army officers for war crimes committed during Israel’s 22-day offensive against blockaded Gaza Strip. Top officials who would be in the judicial cross-hairs could include former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni as well as current Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

More than 1,400 Palestinians were killed during three weeks of Israel’s land, sea and air assault in the impoverished coastal sliver. The offensive also inflicted $ 1.6 billion damage to Gaza economy.

Book Review

By Bill Willers | Dissident Voice | July 10, 2018

There are now in the public sphere two totally contradictory narratives of the assassination in 1968 of Martin Luther King, Jr. with each being advanced again and again over the years by respective advocates as if the other did not exist.

Attorney William Pepper, confidant of Martin Luther King, Jr., became convinced in 1978 that James Earl Ray, the officially declared lone gunman, was innocent. Years of investigation led to his 1995 book, Orders to Kill, in which Pepper presented evidence of governmental involvement in the assassination. Three years later, Gerald Posner, already famous for his support for the Warren Commission’s report concerning President Kennedy’s assassination, published Killing the Dream, a defense of the official governmental contention that Ray was the assassin. The King Family also believed Ray innocent, but due to governmental refusal to pursue a criminal trial, there was instead a 1999 civil trial, The King Family vs. Loyd Jowers et al. Jowers, who had admitted having received the rifle actually used in the shooting, was granted immunity to reveal all he knew. All facets of news media boycotted the trial, arguably the de facto “Trial of the Century”. … continue

Aletho News Original Content

By Aletho News | January 9, 2012

This article will examine some of the connections between the US and UK National Security apparatus and the appearance of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory beginning after the accident at Three Mile Island. … continue

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